Forum: VOW General
Thread: An idea to improve the balance of the game somewhat

Post by: The Sniper(27754)2010-08-19 04:30:37

I've not played in a long time, but I will assume there has been no major overhaul as how the game works in the last year or so. So I would like to suggest a rather drastic alteration to how the attempted moves for each match are determined. My goal is to make VOW more strategical and balanced across the board. Its quite a long post so bear with me.

How the current system works:
- Each player takes it in turns attempting to execute a move.
- To select the move to attempt a random move is selected out of the entire list of moves in the game.
- If the player has bought that move then he will attempt to execute it
- the game will run a calculation on the difficulty of the move ato execute and the 2 players stats for the moves type to work out how likely it is the the move will be countered, and rolls accordingly
- It then rolls between a range for the damage the move deals

This is why matches for players who are higher level against lower levels win so easily all the time, not really because of stats but simply because there is more likelyhood they will attempt a move. VWO Players who have most/all moves will hardly ever/never miss a move and will throughly trounce their lower level opponents.

How my suggestion will work:

My recommendation is bring stats more into it, and have it so although higher levels stand a better chance of winning, it is a less of a gap between different Exp levels. This might be a little confusing but I'll try and keep it as simple as possible.

The variables for this idea are as follows:

Move Difficulty Score (Diff): The difficulty of setting up for each individual move.
Players Moves (Moves): The total number of moves the player owns
Total Move Difficulty Score (TDiff): The total value of all of the players move difficulty scores
Players Skill (Sk): How many unknown moves the players (Moves) are checked against. In other words, the better the players skill, the fewer moves he rolls against to work out if he attempts a move (see below for more details)

The idea revolves around the principle that the more complex moves the player owns, the less frequently he will be able to attempt his various moves at the reward of greater average damage. Conversely the more easy moves the players owns, the more frequently he will attack, at the penalty of lower average damage.

To do this each move must be assigned a (Diff) Score ranging from -3 to +3, based on the potential damage of the move and awkwardness of setting up. (Moves like say Superplex and Piledriver are hard to set up for and as such score +3 difficulty, whereas slap and headlock are easy to set up and would score -3).

Currently the players known moves are checked against all of the moves in the game. In the new system we take the number of (Moves) the player owns and double it to set the base value of the players (Sk)ill. I can't remember how many moves each new player starts with but lets say its 15. So in this case everytime the player has a turn he checks for 1 of his 15 moves out of a total of only 30 moves.

However this is where the moves (Diff)iculty comes in. If the move has a (Diff) of +3, it adds 3 moves for the player to roll against. So instead of 15/30, its now 15/33, this means he has less chance of attempting any of his moves. If on the other hand the player also has a move with -2 for its score his new (Sk) is 15/31. This is done for every single move that the player owns to work out his (TDiff) before the match begins to set the players (Sk) in the match. Ideally (TDiff) will be 0 or lower so the player will have fewer total moves to roll against. This means if a player has 40 (Moves) and -12 (TDiff), he will have 68 (sk), meaning every roll he makes on his turn for 1 of his 40 moves is out of only 68 moves instead of 80.

Well done if you have kept up this far :)

As I say this system will drastically reduce the effect of level difference between players, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if the effect of a players stats would need to be increased to keep higher levels on top.

The advantanges however are: -
- Much easier to find reasonable matches as the player difference is smaller
- Requires much more strategy from the player rather than simply buy all the highest damage class specific mvoes you can.
- Gives players incentives for buying the lower damage moves in the game and discourages LMS Ganking with only high damage moves.
- Will keep matches between players with all moves more interesting as its not a guarantee they will hit a move every roll

Initial problems I see are, alot of balancing issues will inevitably arise form this, and obviously a big work load to implement it. But the benefits can't be ignored. If you understood it, what do you think? ;)

Post by: The Sniper(27754)2010-08-19 05:06:23

And balls I went and put this in the wrong part of the forum. Oh well, Kay sera sera.